I believe it is eminently credible draw a strong association between consciousness and the physical activity of the brain since it is relatively well backed up by scientific observation that there is a one to one correspondence between conscious experience and brain activity. Although we still don't understand precisely how the physical activity creates qualia, I think its perfectly reasonable to say that studying and understanding brain activity constitutes studying and understanding consciousness.
We don't understand consciousness as it pertains to the underlying question; knowing that brain activity can produce consciousness does not get us any closer to knowing that a matrix multiplication can't.
True, but I don't dispute that in principle a lot of matrix multiplication could produce consciousness. I just suggest that an honest appraisal of brains and LLMs suggests little to no consciousness on the part of the latter.
If we use your metric, then an honest appraisal of brains and computers suggests little to no mathematical ability on the part of the latter either. If we assume that a similar medium or structure is necessary for similar results, then it should be highly improbable that a bunch of semiconductors could ever perform even simple math, since they are very structurally dissimilar to the human brain.
Every account of the universe is grounded in brute facts, for which there is no justification. That hardly means we can't claim to understand things. I would say we understand consciousness more or less in the same way we understand nuclear physics: we have a very compelling ontologically flavored justificatory framework which both allows prediction and makes theoretical sense. We know quantum field theory is not the right theory of the universe. We may never know the fundamental theory. But it would be ridiculous to say "we know nothing about how the nucleus works."
Ah. I use the term "the subjective experience of consciousness". IE, what you are experiencing could really just be a VR drug hallucination, completely unrelated to anything else, or an epiphenomenon of a completely mechanistic universe.
